Open-world PvP in Sea of Thieves is pretty bad.

The various worlds mostly seem completely empty. You can see 10x as many ghost and skeleton ships as you see human-controlled ships, and even those are somewhat rare. In most MMOs you’re constantly seeing other players. In Sea of Thieves you can do a whole hour-long quest and never see another player.

Human-controlled ships aren’t marked on the map unless they’re flying the reaper flag. But, people who fly the reaper flag are extremely into PvP, so most people who aren’t also into PvP avoid them. And, they’re easy to avoid because they’re visible on the map. The Reapers only see others on the map if those others are flying level 5 “emissary” flags, showing they’ve been doing quests for a certain faction for a at least an hour of in-game time.

A single quest in Sea of Thieves can easily take half an hour. A quest chain can take a couple of hours. You mostly only get quest rewards at the end of a quest by turning treasure in. If your ship is sunk you lose all the treasure, cannon balls, food and wood you had on board. For a short time the stuff is floating in the ocean where anybody can pick it up. But, there’s no cost to replace / repair your entire ship including anything bolted to it like cannons.

That means that a pirate out hunting for other players has nothing to lose if they’re sunk – maybe 5k gold in supplies (cannonballs and food) if they bought them instead of just searching barrels and everything to gain – potentially the entire haul of whoever they sink. Meanwhile, a pirate at the end of a quest chain has everything to lose, all the treasure from the quests they just completed could be 300k gold, and nothing to gain by winning a PvP battle. If they sink a PvP pirate after them they maybe get some cannonballs, that’s it. That doesn’t encourage epic naval battles, it encourages the one with treasure on board to sprint for the nearest outpost and try to unload and sell quickly.

The sprints to the outpost are also not all that interesting. Since the cannons are only on the sides of the ships, neither the pursuer or the pursued can shoot at each-other. NPC ghost ships can drop mines that players chasing them have to avoid. But, human ships don’t have that option. So, it becomes a sailing race, but a sailing race in a sailing game with very dumbed-down sailing mechanics. (You can sail directly into the path of the wind, for example).

IMO, the game needs a re-think of PvP overall. But, what I want might be too radical a shift from what they have designed.

I think there should be some overall factions that were like the major nations in the actual age of piracy: the English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, and so-on. The players could be privateer-type pirates working under the protection of one of these major factions. That would mean you could see more people when you’re out in the game, but that you wouldn’t have to worry about FFA PVP if you were in an area of the map where your faction had control. But, of course, any lucrative mission would mean leaving the safe area and venturing out either into the open sea, or into another faction’s area. That would make the game world seem less empty. As a privateer you might have to turn over some / most of the value of your treasure haul to your faction. In exchange for their protection (especially things like cannons around their harbors) you’d take a smaller cut of anything you brought in.

Of course, there would also be Free For All PVP pirate players who didn’t belong to any faction and who used secret pirate bases, but being FFA PVP pirates, they could turn on each-other at any time. A true pirate base might shoot at an incoming ship belonging to a major faction, but wouldn’t protect one FFA PVP pirate from another FFA PVP pirate. But, the benefit would be that any treasure they found would be all theirs, with no cut to their faction. The risk would be no “insurance” on their ships. Any ship they lost would cost them dearly.

In terms of combat, the ships in Sea of Thieves should have chaser guns – guns in the bow and stern of ships. Just like real pirate ships, these should be much smaller and less powerful than the main guns, but would give something to do while chasing / being chased. Dropping mines should also be an option for the ship being chased, but also dropping treasure should be easier, so that you could try to bribe whoever was chasing you. (They’d have to make it so that to pick up this treasure the chasing boat would have to cut off the chase for a minute or two – right now you could harpoon that treasure without slowing down).

Edited to add: The amount of treasure you have on board should also affect your handling. A treasure heavy ship should be slightly slower and slightly less maneuverable than an empty ship. The more treasure you piled onto your ship, the slower you’d be. That would let chasers get closer more easily. OTOH, if the lead ship dumped some of their treasure, they’d be lighter and more maneuverable, and if the chaser picked up some of that treasure they’d be heavier and less able to pursue. If you include cannon balls in that calculation, PvP pirates would have to be careful about how many cannonballs they carried, because too many would slow them down, but too few and they wouldn’t have enough to sink their targets. A player who mostly wanted to avoid PvP could choose not to carry cannonballs, making them faster. OTOH, they couldn’t fight back if they were attacked. Even better (if possible) add a visual to make it clear how loaded a ship is by showing how low in the water the ship is riding. A heavily loaded ship is riding low on the water, but maybe it’s a PvP pirate with a lot of cannonballs…

Since there’s no functional upgrades from collecting gold, this kind of works out. A lot of time, I collected tons of gold and just never spent it.

I also wonder if matchmaking will go better. Solo queueing seems to find a lot of people instantly leaving parties, and I suspect they’re trying to find a particular “sea” with their friends to perform group invasions.

I always loved the fact that it was forced PvP. It was interesting how it forced you to make decisions to balance the risk of losing a fight to the reward of getting loot. However, some people got way too sweaty and others didn’t engage with the pvp mechanics. I wish there were choices on what level you wanted to play the game at, like the old sea dogs mode.